As a new teacher stepping into my first day of summer in-service, I had no concrete sense of what my life in the classroom would actually look like, let alone what I would teach from day to day. Bright-eyed and holding my newly minted bachelor’s degree, I received the books for my upper-school humanities classes with a sense of pride. I was even invited to select the books for one of my courses. At first, I was grateful for the opportunity to exercise creativity and make my own imprint on the school.
That confidence lasted until the first day of school. Very quickly, the reality set in: I was expected to build months of lessons from scratch, with little guidance beyond a general sense of the school’s mission and the handful of texts assigned. What had felt like freedom became, almost overnight, an overwhelming burden.
This experience is familiar to many teachers. Even at well-established classical schools like mine, new hires often start out with few curricular resources. At a high level, the school may have a clear vision—the liberal arts, the Great Books, the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty—but in practice, there is often no fully articulated set of guiding questions, content sequences, unit plans, model lessons, or objectives to orient and direct the day-to-day. Instead, the curriculum frequently resides in the minds of experienced teachers who have built their courses year by year through personal effort and ingenuity.
While this approach can work, especially in a school’s early years, it places an extraordinary burden on teachers that is difficult to sustain over time. It also creates instability. Each new hire must effectively recreate the curriculum, and each teacher’s departure risks taking hard-won knowledge with it. The result can be inconsistency in instruction, difficulty onboarding new faculty, and, not infrequently, teacher burnout and attrition.
Over time, what begins as admirable flexibility becomes a structural liability. Without a clearly defined and documented curriculum, even strong schools struggle to sustain excellence or scale their programs effectively. And yet, despite recognizing these challenges, many school leaders delay necessary curriculum work. It is difficult to organize, difficult to delegate, and difficult to fit into the already full demands of teaching and administration.
What does it look like when a school chooses to address this challenge directly? Cathedral High School (CHS) in Houston, Texas, offers a compelling answer.
Over the past year, I have come to know CHS as an exceptional school marked by a clear identity and a deeply rooted sense of mission. Led by Dr. Alexis Kutarna, CHS is the flagship academy of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, an expression of Roman Catholicism distinguished by its Anglican heritage, liturgy, and traditions. The school’s academic program stands on the Ordinariate’s four pillars: sacred worship, sacred wisdom, sacred music, and sacred art. In addition to providing an authentic Catholic education in the classical liberal arts tradition and handing on the patrimony of English Christianity, CHS seeks the renewal of Christian culture in our present age.
From its earliest days, CHS has invested in curriculum design as a core component of the school’s work. Its curriculum committee draws together key administrators, department chairs, and lead teachers who have an incredible level of subject-matter expertise and a shared philosophical vision for Catholic education.
Now only in its fourth year of operation and preparing to graduate its first class, CHS is well advanced in documenting its curriculum. With an eye toward its own continued growth, as well as the growth of other Ordinariate schools for which it serves as a model, CHS has made a deliberate decision to complete the work it began in its early years. This has meant revising initial curricular documents, refining and expanding them, and ensuring that all courses are clearly articulated and aligned in both aim and depth across every discipline and grade level.
Arcadia had the privilege of supporting CHS in this effort by helping to structure and guide the process. In close partnership with Dr. Kutarna, we designed a six-month project to support the faculty in developing and refining their curricular documentation. The work began with a thorough audit of existing materials to identify areas that were underdefined or misaligned. From there, our Academy Operations consulting team facilitated weekly working sessions with each department chair to set goals, track progress, and refine curricular content. Along the way, we provided detailed editorial and strategic feedback to ensure clarity, rigor, coherence, and alignment with the school’s mission.
The result, to be completed this June, is a fully documented, integrated, and scalable academic program, including guiding documents for each discipline, scopes and sequences, and detailed syllabi and unit guides for each course.
What made this project especially meaningful was not only the quality of the final product but also the way it was accomplished. Because the work was done in close collaboration with CHS’s faculty, it strengthened their sense of ownership over the curriculum and deepened their ability to articulate and carry forward the school’s vision. In the process, CHS also cultivated leaders among the faculty, built confidence in undertaking complex institutional projects, and further established itself as a model for the renewal of Catholic education.
Though deeply important, it is easy for schools to delay this kind of investment in curriculum. As Stephen Covey famously articulated in the important-urgent matrix, the most important work is often not the most urgent and is therefore easily neglected. When a program is functioning well enough, documentation and alignment fall into that “important but not urgent” category in quadrant 2, consistently deferred in favor of more immediate operational demands. Yet it is precisely the non-urgent work of curriculum planning and design that enables schools to become excellent and enduring institutions.
The experience of the new teacher, standing on the first day of school with little more than a stack of books and a vague sense of direction, should not be a defining feature of otherwise excellent schools. What begins as an opportunity for creativity too often becomes an unsustainable burden, one that signals not strength but the absence of shared structure. Schools that take the time to document and align their curriculum relieve this burden, replacing uncertainty with clarity and individual improvisation with a coherent, mission-aligned program. In doing so, they not only support their teachers more effectively, but also build the conditions for consistency, continuity, and lasting excellence.